Notes tagged with Notions

You can pretty much ignore the curatorial premise here, which is all about opening up the gallery to new artistic networks. All that really means is that Open Cube is an open submission exhibition. But since the 17 artists in this ‘international group exhibition’ are all young, all London-based and all the products of prominent art schools, it’s hardly the most profound overthrow of established art world values.

When it comes to the works themselves, though, there’s a lot that’s intelligent – and intelligently selected. One strand of the show revolves around notions of wealth and status – such as Jacopo Trabona’s sheets of paper slashed with a diamond and Martin John Callanan’s photographs of a penny, a euro and other units of currency, enlarged and illuminated like archeological treasures. Several other works focus on pattern and decoration, from delicate charcoal tracings of ornamental tiles by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, to Fay Nicolson’s complex, colourful prints of kaleidoscopic rippling effects.

In fact, the show functions best as an overview of what an emerging generation is interested in. It’s smart and enjoyable, if not quite the system-challenging experiment it reckons itself to be.

encoding_experience/ is the first of a series of exhibitions inspired by the ways in which artists are embracing critical, hands on interventive strategies towards the understanding of, and experimentation with media. The artists in the show open up issues of privacy, piracy and control, paradigms that are deeply embedded into technology and the way technology is designed. Most of the artists favour a collaborative, socio-centric approach to their work. They have an agenda about thinking through questions such as; Where does the technology come from? What is the real use of a computer? What are the social issues around regular access to domestic machines i.e. game consoles, home stereos and digital cameras. How do we use and question systems that tirelessly reproduce and augment environments, image and sound?

Actively engaging with conceptual concerns, DaDa-esque notions of performance, hacking and intellectual property; encoding_experience presents an insight into how electronic media and craft knowledge operates in current art practice, not only in terms of its functionality, but also in regards to artists who have a critical approach towards the politics, aesthetics and ecconomies coded into these systems.